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Over recent seasons, Talia Byre has emerged as one of London’s brightest rising stars. But despite the buzz around her five-year-old label, designer Talia Lipkin-Connor has taken her time to hit the runway. For Spring/Summer 2026, “it all sort of aligned”. This weekend, she will make her runway debut at London Fashion Week, as she continues to scale her womenswear label, known for its off-kilter knits, feminine tailoring and playful prints, which has captured the attention of fashion editors and City workers alike.
A Central Saint Martins graduate, Lipkin-Connor launched her label from her sister’s flat in Camden, North London, during the pandemic in 2020. Through its accessible price point (most pieces retail from £300 to £400), a strong focus on direct-to-consumer (DTC) and targeted wholesale through smaller retailers with loyal communities, Lipkin-Connor hopes to build a label that lasts in a challenging climate for emerging British designers.
Today, Lipkin-Connor employs three people and has a studio in Hackney, East London. The brand has seven stockists, but DTC represents 60 per cent of sales (annual revenues are undisclosed). And after a series of intimate London Fashion Week presentations, she’s ready to take the next step. She also secured Ugg as a show sponsor, which helped her bring it to life. “This season’s more refined, more press focused, more buyer focused,” the designer explains, speaking via Zoom from her studio.
The space around her is a hive of activity as her team works on finishing the collection. “I’m just going to move into the kitchen, everyone’s come in and moving the rails,” she laughs. It’s a couple of weeks pre-show, and the designer is fresh from a trip up to Liverpool, near her hometown of Warrington, to take part in a panel for the British Fashion Council’s City Wide Celebration — part of new BFC CEO Laura Weir’s aims to decentralise British fashion.
The talk was a stone’s throw from Bold Street, Liverpool, where Lipkin-Connor’s great uncle ran multi-storey boutique Lucinda Byre from 1964 til 1982. The store — named after a distant relative — sold pieces from Vivienne Westwood and Mary Quant, alongside its own knitwear line.
During Covid, Lipkin-Connor realised that all of this heritage would disappear with the oldest generation of her family, who were the last ones to work in the store before it closed. So she launched Talia Byre; not a continuation of the store, but a brand inspired by her family’s retail heritage and values. “It just felt too important to not carry it on,” she says.
A new world of retail
After a pandemic spent designing early collections from her sister’s living room, Talia Byre was inducted into independent Milanese showroom in 2021, which helped attract major stockists, from Ssense to Nordstrom, in the first year. Those early orders helped fund the label. “That’s how I really got [the brand] off the ground. I probably wouldn’t have really been able to do it without them, at least to the extent that we’re operating at now,” she says.
Back then, fashion was firmly in its wholesale era, with emerging designers hinging their entire businesses on major retailers. But over the last two years, we’ve seen the demise of Matches, and major financial challenges for power players from Ssense to Saks Global, causing retailers to pull back on orders from emerging designers. “It was a different climate for the wholesale market then. It is a very different world now,” Lipkin-Connor says.
So, Talia Byre exited the showroom two years ago and pivoted to DTC, which was “like starting from scratch”, the founder says. She launched an e-commerce site in spring 2024 and prioritised working with smaller boutiques rather than major retailers, including New York stores Cafe Forgot and Maimoun as well as Visit For in Tokyo.
Lipkin-Connor would consider returning to bigger wholesale players in the future, but right now, she can rely on the smaller stores because “they know what they will sell through”, she says. “The bigger stores don’t [know], realistically. I wasn’t into the markdowns, and I wasn’t into the over-buying.” Instead, the goal is producing products she knows will sell for her own site, and for stores who know their customer.
In this vein, Lipkin-Connor created an icons collection in 2023, allowing her to release new iterations of her bestselling items — like her black knitwear or mini bolter bags — each season on her e-commerce site. From here, she can drive newness and experiment more with her seasonal collections. For the show, this time around, she’s excited to include more “world-building” showpieces, which can also be produced in white, Lipkin-Connor says, to bolster the brand’s burgeoning bridal business.
Like many young designers who have experimented with bridal to create an additional revenue stream, Lipkin-Conner dipped her toe into bridal while designing for a friend. She has since produced several custom bridal looks, for fans of the brand who want to maintain their personal style on their big day.
“All of our brides come through word of mouth, which is actually quite a wild thing,” the designer says. “We’ve got friends who are like, ‘Oh, I saw that Talia is doing bridal now. Why don’t you pop down?’ So they’ll come to the studio.”
Elsewhere, Talia Byre re-issued a line of knitwear from the Lucinda Byre store, partly inspired by a jumper that Lipkin-Connor’s friend found at London’s Portobello Market. To stay close to the heritage of Lucinda Byre, she is in touch with some of the original buyers from the store, who were close with her great uncle. She hears from former customers, too. “We even get emails from people being like, ‘Do you still stock this?’ Someone even shared a picture of their wife in her wedding dress that she bought from the store. It’s totally wild.”
Lipkin-Connor is keen to recreate this spirit and replicate the Lucinda Byre store one day in London, perhaps in Clerkenwell or Highbury, or in the east near her studio. “I think there’s definitely a gap for that. Me and my sister, we love a mooch. Where do you do that now where it’s about meeting people, community and personal experience? Whether you’re buying more accessible products like jersey, or whether you’re doing bridal, I’ve realised people want to come into our world, meet the team and be a part of it.”
Building loyalty and legacy
While she’s got more of a “let’s just crack on” attitude, Lipkin-Connor acknowledges it’s not an easy time to be a brand founder — and finding talent can be a challenge.
Unlike many emerging labels, which often rely on legions of interns, Talia Byre takes on one intern a season, so they get proper training and are properly paid. Around showtime, the brand invites old assistants to return temporarily, so the designer is surrounded by people who know the ropes. “I take the intern thing really seriously. We don’t have space for loads of people. I would rather have someone here for six months, train them up properly and then they become an asset that could come back,” she says.
As the designer transitions into more of a creative director role, this strategy could be crucial. “Hitting year five is quite a pivotal moment, my job is now transforming into various other things,” Lipkin-Connor says. Already, she’s overseeing rather than draping every look, having trained Turner in her techniques. “I’m [increasingly] like a conductor,” she smiles.
For now, it’s a small orchestra, which has been helpful. “We’ve managed to survive Matches and Ssense because we’re so small and agile,” she says. “When I was studying 10 years ago, we were being taught what the industry knew at the time. It was, ‘If you’re a London designer, you do this and this spits out the other end.’ Now, it feels like a bit more of a free for all, which isn’t a bad thing. I think the rules have been completely broken down, and that it’s given people an opportunity to think outside the box, with bridal or direct-to-consumer.”
Now, Talia Byre is at what she calls a “refinement point”. “We’ve tried lots of different avenues now, and we know this route will give us longevity,” she says.
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